LOVE AND DEATH IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

All of the giallo contributions of director/writer Sauro Scavolini took place within the space of about two years, while both before and after that 1971-72 period Scavolini plied his trade in other genres. But since that small sample of works includes one of my ten best giallos, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM, Scavolini's "farewell to giallos" merits some sustained attention.

Structurally, GARDEN isn't as well-constructed as the best of this subgenre. Like a lot of "old dark house mysteries," the film's eminent character is dead when the main story starts, and the audience must follow an amateur detective sussing out the unhappy lives of rich siblings Azzurra (Erika Blanc) and Manfredi (Peter Lee Lawrence).

The "detective," an unnamed professor of ornithology, rents the sumptuous estate where Azzurra and Manfredi were raised. The professor knows nothing of the former occupants of the estate: he only intends to study the bird life in the adjacent forest. However, in said forest the bird-fancier discovers a pile of wadded-up audiotape. The professor untangles and cleans up the tape, which he's improbably able to replay on a tape machine.

 The tapes reveal the history of Azzurra as she confides in her psychiatrist regarding her twisted history with Manfredi. Both were raised without the oversight of their parents, so that they started sleeping together as kids, which grew into a sexual relationship. Later Azzurra marries another man, and Manfredi takes up with a "free spirit" named Viola, but neither of them is able to let the other sibling go. For instance, the tapes reveal to the professor that after Azzura married, Manfredi left the estate for a while, only to return with Viola, attempting (without much success) to maintain an art studio. In keeping with the title, the forbidden love of the siblings culminates in death, and the surviving sibling even extends his menace to the amateur detective.

GARDEN's pace is slow, possibly to take full advantage of the opulent setting of mansion and vernal paradise. The "love and death" trope isn't uniformly maintained throughout the professor's discoveries, but I assign high-mythicity to GARDEN less because of its rambling plot than for Scavolini's formulation of the transgressive couple, an "Adam and Eve" who exist not to propagate a new future but to be destroyed by their past. To be sure, the script (by Scavolini and a woman with no other IMDB credits) backs off on the incest-theme. Azzurra, who often manipulates Manfredi to keep him at her beck and call, cruelly tells him that they were never brother and sister: that he was a boy adopted by the family after Azzura's actual brother perished in childbirth. But this revelation seems random, since it doesn't hold any consequences for the plot-- and besides, if Azzurra's parents wanted to preserve the illusion of a viable male heir, why didn't either of them stick around to administer the estate and make sure that the two phony siblings made good marriages? The unnamed parents are more like a pair of otiose divinities who just dump their progeny into a beautiful paradise, just to watch them destroy one another.

Oddly, the trope of "perilous psycho" applies to both siblings, and though Manfredi is the one who becomes a murderer, Azzurra's Sadean influence seems far more profound and pernicious.

                  

  

DAIGORO VS. GOLIATH (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I consider this the first "kaiju comedy" feature film. I've heard some critics assign that distinction to KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, but though I've never seen the original Japanese cut, KKVG isn't structured like a comedy, which requires a lot more overt jokes than even an American distributor could have possibly removed.

DAIGORO was a reworking of a failed (and ostensibly serious) Godzilla project, which was to have been a collaboration between Godzilla's studio Toho and the special effects company Tsurabaya. Once the Big G was off the table, the producers shifted gears toward a comedy for small children, quite as if someone said, "Well, if we can't use Godzilla, let's do our own version of the Son of Godzilla, but make him even dorkier." Indeed, the hippo-like visage of Daigoro, a "kid kaiju" like Minilla, seems to be a joke in its own right.

Unlike Minilla, Daigoro is dependent upon human beings for parental guidance. His mother was a subterranean creature awakened by nuclear tests, and after she ravaged Japan, the military killed her. However, she left behind Baby Daigoro. One might expect the government to take charge of the infant kaiju, whether for study or weaponization-- but this would have deprived the kid-audience of the nuclear-family experience. So the government allows one private individual, an inventor named Goro, to adopt Daigoro and keep him on an island. Trouble is. Goro has to pay for the kid-monster's upkeep, and his only way of doing so is to enter Japanese contests for wacky new inventions. However, Daigoro eventually gets to prove his mettle when a more destructive giant monster, dubbed Goliath, descends to Earth and begins tearing things up.

Though most adults will get little out of the humor here, it's at least palatable if one thinks of kids seeing such jokes for the first time. It's at least lively, not repeating the same jokes the way some Gamera-flicks did, and the weird end-scene with the genial kaiju availing himself of a giant privy has to be seen to be believed. The combative action between the giant monsters wasn't much better than that of a SyFy critter-flick. There's an ecology lecture about how human misuse of the biosphere has weakened the atmosphere, thus making it easier for meteors-- and monsters named Goliath-- to descend and wreak destruction.

The one element that's not totally aimed at kids is Goro's niece Yoshiko. She's of marriageable age, but her uncle's reputation is so bad that every arranged marriage she explores falls through. This is an odd side-plot for a kids' movie, especially since it doesn't affect the main plot, though she manages some sort of hookup at the end. Maybe the writers just thought kids of both genders could identify with having to listen to the complaints of older sisters.                   

            

WOLF LAKE (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Before re-screening the nine episodes of this failed series, I remembered only one or two snippets from the show, which is admittedly more than I usually retain from a series I only saw once, twenty years ago. That said, when I watched the show with my reviewer's hat on, those snippets were the only good parts of the program. 

Cop John Kanin (Lou Diamond Phillips) proposes to girlfriend Ruby Wilder (Mia Kirschner) and she accepts-- only to flee to the wilds of Seattle the next day. John tracks her to the small town of Wolf Lake, ruled by the dominant Cates family, and though Ruby avoids contact with her former fiancee, John eventually learns that (a) Ruby is a scion of the Cates family, and (b) her family expects her to marry a local guy named Tyler Creed. But only the viewers, not John, learn that the town plays host to a clan of werewolves.

This might sound like a promising soap-opera, but the characters remain flat and uninvolving despite the efforts of talented actors. Sometimes a character acts precipitately for no stated reason, like Ruby's stepmother Vivian (Sharon Lawrence) sleeping with Ruby's intended ahead of nuptials. Graham Greene has many scenes as a guy who seems to know where all the bodies are buried and keeps saying cryptic things that don't engender mystery or humor. And for a show whose title and premise offer lycanthropes, there are precious few loup-garous.

The best thing about the DVD collection is that it contains both the unaired pilot episode, whose premise was reworked for the flop series, and a brief reflection from series creator John Leekley, who wrote the pilot but was not associated with the series proper. In 1996 Leekley had created and co-written a vampire series for the Fox network, KINDRED: THE EMBRACED. Although KINDRED only lasted one episode less than LAKE's run, apparently CBS asked Leekley to repeat the same act, but with werewolves in Washington (State). The pilot does create a more evocative sense of the werewolf mythology, and though Leekley utters no overt criticisms of the official series, he does say he thought the concept required strong investment. What probably happened is that CBS didn't like Leekley's pilot and went to some other showrunners to rework the concept; showrunners who didn't really like the premise and so played down the werewolves (except for a tedious arc about an adolescent Wolf Lake girl who fears that having sex will make her turn hairy). Leekley's original concept might or might not have resulted in a better series, but the LAKE we have is definitely one big drip.

                

KONG: RETURN TO THE JUNGLE (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological. metaphysical*

Wow, what a shame that the makers of KONG THE ANIMATED SERIES didn't just hang things up with the first of their two DTV movies, KONG: KING OF ATLANTIS. That big-monkey flick was merely mediocre, but RETURN seems a betrayal of even the small coterie of fans that the show might have garnered.

RETURN, a CGI animation, was produced a couple of years after 2004's THE POLAR EXPRESS, and RETURN shows a similar problem with making living creatures seem alive. All the regular characters I summarized in the KING review look like super-streamlined facsimiles of their hand-drawn counterparts. Kong and his human handlers go through their usual routines, but they have little sense of physical continuity.

The one element that a KTAS fan might like about RETURN is that, unlike KING, the main villain here is the one who appeared in the majority of the half-hour episodes. In most episodes, Professor Ramon de la Porta would seek some evil goal, the Kong group would intervene, and Porta would use stolen tech to create some colossal animal-human hybrid to fight Kong. Porta's career reaches some closure in RETURN, though he has to share the fiend-stage with a new villain, a big game hunter who'd like to put Kong's head on a wall.

The CGI animation also takes away from the big-monster action, and as if the writers got tired of the hybrid-schtick, this time the anthropoid crusader only fights a T-Rex. Maybe someone thought of this opponent as a callback to the 1933 KONG, but I may be giving the producers too much credit. The series and the first movie are at best blips in the history of TV animation, but RETURN doesn't even deserve blip-status.

                

ORGY OF THE VAMPIRES (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

The alternate title for this film, VAMPIRE'S NIGHT ORGY, is closer to the original Italian title. But what's the point of emphasizing "night" when the movie's main conceit is that Tolnio, the town where all the "orgies" take place, is so overcast that vampires and other horrors can walk around with no problems.

The little I've read about director Leon Klimovsky suggests that he had no great enthusiasm for horror but simply regarded the movies as routine labors. I've seen all but two of his fear-films and regard only THE WEREWOLF AND THE VAMPIRE WOMAN as better than average, though that was probably because the writers stuffed the narrative with so many incidents that the movie seemed dream-like. But there's nothing dream-like, or even very sexy (save for one scene) about ORGY.

 This time the reigning vampire-aristocrat, the Countess (Helga Line), doesn't plan to "pull up stakes." So instead of just inviting one outsider to her dismal domain as did a certain Count, she sends for a half-dozen professionals to service her mansion. Most of these earnest jobseekers are cannon fodder for the horrors of Tolnio, and even the leads Luis and Alma (Jack Taylor, Dianik Zurakowska) are pretty one-note. This wouldn't be a problem if the starring monsters were more interesting, but they're almost as desultory in execution.

What are the monsters of Tolnio? Well, the Countess is a fangs-and-all vampire, but she seems to be the only one. All of the other townsfolk seem to hanker more after flesh than blood, and I could easily believe that ORGY started out as a "town of cannibals" idea to which someone added a vampire to snare the lovers of sanguinary specters. But despite the addition of a measly subplot about some sort of "ghost boy," the Countess' scemes are the only one that inject some "life" (so to speak) in the dull proceedings.

In one scene, the Countess (quite fetching though the actress was pushing forty) seduces the twenty-something tutor, beds hi, fangs him, and then tosses him to her cannibal minions. She doesn't seem worried about other feedings, for she doesn't attack anyone else until the climax. As Luis and Alma steal a car and flee the evil town, the Countess stows herself in the back seat and waits till they're driving to attack. Alma kills the vampiress with a handy stake, but her body dissolves into worms and mold. And when the couple takes the nearest constables to the site of the murders-- no Tolnio, nor even a vague rumor of some cursed place that once existed there. Aside from the pulchritude of the two primary Euro-babes, this is one dull ORGY.             

FIVE WOMEN FOR THE KILLER (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

KILLER was the third directorial film for Stelvio Massi. In Italy he would become known more for hardboiled crime films than for horror, but I suspect today English-speaking film-fans mostly know Massi for his second and last giallo movie: 1989's bizarre ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL.  

Next to ARABELLA, KILLER comes as a bit too conservative, though the cinematography is always good (particularly in the generously lingering female nude scenes) and the basic situation is compelling. Writer Giorgio (English actor Francis Matthews) returns to Italy, anticipating a reunion with his pregnant wife Erika. To his horror he finds her newly dead, the victim of a miscarriage. The baby survives at a local hospital, where Giorgio consults with his own doctor, one Lydia (Pasquale Rivault), an in-law to Erika. The writer then gets a double body-blow when he steals a look at his own file, and sees that Lydia diagnosed him as infertile, incapable of siring a child.  

Erika's death then precedes (unleashes?) a serial killer who begins knife-killing women-- often pregnant women who have some connection to Giorgio. In giallos, the trope of "gotta kill all the sexy women" usually focuses upon promiscuous females who usually are not in a family way. But since no woman can get pregnant naturally without SOME promiscuity, KILLER might have offered some psychological insights on the durable "woman as virgin or whore" trope. However, most of the time Massi's pace is slow and the (subbed) dialogue is mundane. Even though the victims are just tangentially connected to Giorgio, those associations are enough to interest the police.

The slow pace allows Massi to build a better supply of red herrings than one finds in many thrillers (including ARABELLA), and the complications regarding Giorgio's infertility and the killer's identity dovetail nicely. The murderer's obsession with pregnant victims is enough by itself to propel the film into the uncanny domain, though it helps that the murdered women have strange symbols carved into their flesh. And Massi does flout convention by making the killer's glove grey rather than black.  

NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

No one would accuse Ed Wood's NIGHT OF THE GHOULS of being a "wandering minstrel" a la Gilbert and Sullivan, but the movie certainly is a "thing of shreds and patches." GHOULS, in addition to being a rough sequel to BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, borrows footage from three other Wood projects: HELLBORN, of which the director shot about fifteen minutes in 1952, and two 1957 pilots for an unsold TV horror-anthology. For decades all three were lost, but in more recent years Wood-ologists have managed to unearth both the HELLBORN footage and one of the two pilots, FINAL CURTAIN. Perhaps ironically, though, it's the other, still-lost pilot, THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED, that seems to have had the greatest influence on how Wood cobbled together his disparate materials. This site was good enough to provide a summary of the BANSHEE story as Wood presented it in prose:

A beautiful young woman is aware that she is dead but does not seem to understand why she has been summoned back to the swamp behind her father's now-decaying home. She can hear the anguished screaming of the banshee who has traditionally haunted the property. The woman scans her memory in search of clues as to why she was dragged from her peaceful grave. Suddenly, the reason becomes clear: she is to replace the banshee.

Both of the TV pilots were about characters having inevitable encounters with death, and though in 1957 Wood was only a little over thirty years old, he seems to have nurtured something of a death-fetish in some of his major works. In GHOULS what was only a mysterioso encounter between a young woman (Valda Hansen) and a banshee (Jeannie Stevens) becomes interpolated with a wider story, also about inevitable death. Hansen has new scenes in GHOULS, though I believe all of Stevens' appearances may stem either from BANSHEE or FINAL CURTAIN. (Famed cross-dresser Wood is said to have played Stevens' role-- a woman in a heavy black veil and robe-- for a few quick scenes in GHOULS.)  

 

This time out, Hansen plays Sheila, the accomplice of a phony spiritualist named Karl (Kenne Duncan), though to his customers he bills himself as "Dr Acula"-- and even had the part been essayed by Bela Lugosi, most 1950s audiences would have groaned at such a corny pun. Still, had Lugosi lived long enough to play "Dr Acula," he would have found himself on "familiar ground." At the movie's opening, fake medium Karl has moved into Willows Lake House, the location where Lugosi played the manor's original owner, mad scientist Eric Vornoff, who dies at the conclusion of BRIDE. Karl, though, has fixed up Vornoff's old house to draw in superstitious customers, and in addition he has Sheila drift around the grounds in a white dress, pretending to be "The White Ghost." Karl has a couple of other helpers, but they barely rate a mention next to his mute mountain of muscle Lobo, who survived the devastation of Vornoff's lab but has become Karl's enforcer.

Unfortunately for the mendacious mystic, some citizens catch sight of the White Ghost and ask the cops to check things out. Admittedly, the constables might have done so anyway, because the Black Ghost (and former Banshee) has also been meandering the area, and has killed at least two people. In any event, two cops are assigned to suss out Willows Lake House. One is Officer Kelton (Paul Marco), a veteran of both BRIDE and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. The other is new character Lt Bradford (Duke Moore), who spends the entire film clad in a tuxedo. Why? Because Wood wanted to recycle one FINAL CURTAIN scene, in which Moore's tuxedo'ed character, "The Actor," encounters Stevens' (blonde) character, "The Vampire." In my review of CURTAIN, I asserted that "The Vampire" was *probably* supposed to be a creation of The Actor's imagination. But here, the Black Ghost-- both in her black-veiled and blonde incarnations-- is a real spirit, one of several accidentally summoned to the lake house. Karl knows himself but slenderly, for it turns out his medium skills are real.

To be fair to Wood, he does set up the incursion of these spirits at the film's beginning. In a monologue that seems to be a framing-device, celebrity psychic Criswell (also of PLAN 9) talks of "The Threshold People" and describes them as "monsters to be pitied-- monsters to be despised" (a line recycled from FINAL CURTAIN). However, Criswell and a half-dozen other male ghosts show up to bring Karl to his doom, that of being suffocated in a coffin. (This mirrors both the dramatic conclusion of CURTAIN and the comical ending of the Wood-scripted NECROMANIA.) Meanwhile, the Black Ghost gets the White Ghost, Lobo dies of gunshot wounds, and the cops try to figure out what happened. 

Incidentally, the three-four minutes of HELLBORN footage appear during Criswell's opening monologue. The most interesting nugget is a scene in which some young toughs beat up and rob a man while Mona (PLAN 9) McKinnon looks on coldly. I wondered if the scenario might have involved the young woman luring the older man to a location where he could be mugged. GHOULS is definitely more fully in the "so bad it's good" category than BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, with GHOULS' ridiculous excuse for a seance and a flat performance from Kenne Duncan as Karl.  There's also an odd and unresolved subplot in which one of Karl's customers is a young swindler who's been making up to a wealthy old woman, and who has apparently directed Karl to get a "seal of approval" as to his intentions. All demerits considered though, Wood does put across some genuine fear of death that's not fully diminished by his loopy dialogue.

                      

                    

KONG: THE ANIMATED SERIES (2001/2005-06)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological. metaphysical*

As a metaphenomenalist, I don't mind it when a show asks me to believe twelve impossible things, whether before breakfast or any other time. But even in a cartoon series aimed at kids, I could wish those impossible things added up to something more than ordinary.

It's curious that the writers even bothered to connect their KONG to the primal 1933 masterpiece, which related the complex but straightforward fable of an island where prehistoric life survived, and where a primitive Black tribe sacrificed women to the appetite of their gargantuan simian god. But that's the setup: after the 1933 Kong fell from the Empire State, a scientist, Lorna Jenkins, took a DNA sample from the big ape. She also did a lot of research on the renamed "Kong Island," where she found no primitive African tribe, but objects called "Primal Stones," which hailed from ancient Atlantis. (Kong Island is now located in the Bermuda Triangle, which I guess excuses the DNAPE's association not only with Atlantis but a host of other New Age concepts.)

Why Lorna does all this comes down to "just reasons," and this includes waiting about sixty years before she creates Clone-Kong-- possibly so that she could mingle the original ape-DNA with that of her grandson Jason. Young Jason grows up thinking of Clone-Kong as his "big brother"-- but only until Lorna's family is endangered by a villain who wants access to the magic of the Primal Stones. So Grandma takes her DNAPE and her research to the hard-of-access island, not reaching out to her grandson until he's of college age. Not content with re-creating a mammoth monkey. she's also invented devices called "cyber-links." A human who wears such a doohickey can magically merge his DNA with that of an animal, and conjure forth a gigantic humanoid creature. Why did Grandma want such a device? Reasons.

The real extrinsic reason was to provide heaps of Big Monster Action. The aforementioned villain gets hold of some of Lorna's links, and with them he can make himself, or one of his numerous henchmen, into huge beast-men in order to catch all the Primal Stones. Only Kong, who is "The Protector" of his mystic domain, can battle such titans-- and heroic Jason gets to tag along by merging his mind (but not his body) with that of Kong, sort of a primeval mecha-pilot.

While some kid-vids are clever enough that adults can appreciate them, KONG was designed to be dully repetitive, as evidenced by the fact that most of the episodes can be watched out of broadcast order. Villain and henchmen ferret out a Stone and use the links to become temporary monsters. Kong defeats them and they transform back and escape to do the same thing next episode.  

Jason BTW has two other partners in peril besides the big monkey: his comic relief college-buddy Tann, and what appears to be the only native of Kong Island. an acrobatic, copper-skinned shamaness named Lua. The three young people and Kong provide all the hero-action, with Lua using her shaman-powers to explicate whatever needs explication.

The only other point worth making is that if I watched this as a kid, I would rather have had the DNAPE dueling with traditional monsters. But there only a few of these-- a giant Yeti, a Wendigo--to allay the monotony.      

THE NEXT VICTIM (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS

A lot of the hour-long progarmmers on Brian Clemens' THRILLER emphasized mundane naturalistic psycho-killers. My only real reason for labeling this psycho as "uncanny" is because Clemens' script models him strongly after Norman Bates, with a "Lodger" touch or two worked in.

Rich lady Sandy Marshall (Carroll Baker) returns to the apartment she shares with her not-so-rich husband Derek. Sandy has been in the hospital recovering from a car crash, and she's still occupying a wheelchair, though her prognosis is that she will regain full mobility. Sandy's expecting just to pass the day quietly while Derek's gone on business. However, it's a hot summer day in London, and most of the locals have gone to the beach for the weekend. Unfortunately there's also a serial killer who's been preying on London women lately. The cops have one clue: a single prospective victim escaped the murderer, and she heard him refer to her as "mother."

A couple of cops get on the psycho's trail, and though they ferret out the correct suspect, they have no impact on Sandy's apartment ordeal. The killer gains entrance to the gated complex by pretending to be a delivery driver, and the camera's careful not to show his face at first-- though there's no mystery because there's only one suspect, aside from a briefly seen, creepy maintenance guy (Ronald Lacey).

Sandy doesn't hear from a neighbor when she expects to, which causes her to start worrying. Then in the near-deserted complex, Sandy encounters a handsome young guy named Tom (Max Mason). She appreciates his company at first, since he claims to be a resident. But eventually Tom seems "off" to Sandy, especially when he speaks of her car accident as highly improbable-- as if someone might have arranged it. And he also mentions that he served his wheelchair-bound mother for ten years, which seems to be his reason for wanting to hang out with Sandy.   

Clemens almost seems to be setting up Tom to be some amateur detective who (correctly) suspects Derek of being a wife-killer. So when Sandy knocks Tom over the head and tries to wheel away for her very life, Clemens seems to be leading the viewer to believe Tom's a good guy. But no, Tom's the Oedipal assailant, though Clemens, to keep his precious ambiguity, barely explicates Tom's psycho-profile. The beleaguered viewer can only presume that Tom targeted Sandy and meant to kill her but started seeing her as "good non-sexual mother" rather than the "bad sexual mothers" he believed his other victims to be. But as Sandy flees, she needs a new antagonist--so Deadly Derek comes back that same night to knock off Sandy and blame it on the psycho. He and Tom end up fighting over Sandy, and after both men die, the movie just ends, unceremoniously. Usually Clemens' THRILLER dramas are solid if unambitious melodramas-- but this one is just a jumbled botch.  

THE SCREAMING SKULL (1958)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

The Wikipedia essay on SCREAMING SKULL mentions that when director Alex Nicol was trying to persuade his lead actress to take the part, he faked her out by claiming he intended to do a remake of Hitchcock's REBECCA. This was not a coincidence. The SKULL screenplay from John Kneubuhl has almost nothing in common with the F. Marion Crawford short story, which contributed the title and (maybe) the name of one of the characters, which happens to be "Marion." For the most part SKULL is a reprise of REBECCA, being about a second wife's anxieties as to her new husband's feelings about his deceased first wife-- though Kneubuhl also seems to have injected a fair amount of the pop-Freudianism found in the Hitchcock oeuvre.

The film starts with Eric Whitlock (John Hudson) bringing his timid second wife Jenni (Peggy Webber) to the estate Eric once shared with his first wife Marion. The estate seems lavish, with extensive gardens, live peacocks, and the grave of Marion, topped by a monument with her image. Curiously, the interior of the main house is largely bereft of furnishings. Eric explains that though the mansion was bequeathed to Marion by her late parents, she, upon marrying Eric, had all the furniture put in storage, intending to re-decorate, so that Marion could put her own stamp on the dwelling of her dead parents. This loosely implies that only a few months ensued between Marion's marriage and her accidental death, caused when she slipped near the swimming pool, cracked her skull and drowned in the pool. Eric inherited the property only, which circumstance will probably set off warning bells for detectives in the audience.

Jenni also comes from money, and both of her parents are dead-- though under more psycho-dramatic events. She tells her husband's pastor Reverend Snow-- one of only three other characters in the film-- that she Jenni at some point experienced an Electra complex. She became aware of loving her father and hating her mother, not least because she thought her mother disliked Jenni for not being "gay" like the mother. Jenni's fantasy of wishing her mother dead comes to ironic fruition when both parents drown at sea and she's unable to save either of them, despite her best (conscious) efforts. She enters a sanitarium to recover from a breakdown, and after being released she meets and marries Eric. To her horror, one of the few furnishings in the mansion is a portrait of Marion, which reminds Jenni of her dead mother. The other three characters are also living reminders of Marion-- Reverend Snow and his wife to a lesser extent, and to a greater extent, the retarded-seeming gardener Mickey (director Nicol). Mickey was raised on the estate alongside Marion, as if the two were siblings.

Then strange things start happening to Jenni as she sleeps by herself in the mansion. She hears screams in the night, but Eric tells her she heard the cries of the peacocks. She starts seeing disembodied skulls, and Eric tells her that crazy Mickey's gaslighting her. But as soon as the viewer sees ceramic skulls rolling around, he'll guess he's left the domain of Hitchcock for that of William Castle. Eric's hoaxing Jenni to get her money, just as he most probably killed Marion for the same reason. Unfortunately for Eric, his return to the scene of the first crime brings Marion back to undead life-- and she avenges herself by emulating the skull-motif of Eric's plot.

SKULL wasn't meant to grab the audience with anything more than penny-ante Gothicisms, so I can't claim the lousy second half of the movie was any sort of surprise. The first half does at least create some potential for Jenni to overcome her rather random complex, and it's for that unrealized potential that I grade the film's mythicity as "fair." 

ADDENDUM: One improvement might have been to suggest that Eric played into Jenni's father-fantasies. By casting Eric as more of a "bad dad," that would have made the mother-imago Marion at least benign and thus suggesting that Jenni's maternal resentments were overblown.    

SPECTERS (1987), MAYA (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Having been thoroughly disgusted with this inferior "demons on the loose" flick from Lucio Fulci, I promptly watched a couple more by a director I'd never heard of, Marcello Avallone. Neither was very good, but cumulatively they did cleanse my palate.

SPECTERS had nothing going for it except that all its thoroughly routine characters are at least consistent in the ways they act and react, in contrast to DEMONIA. Donald Pleasance is the only "name" actor, and he's just playing a standard "archeologist who unearths a demon from an old sepulchre." The archeological dig takes place near Rome, but Avallone and his co-writers couldn't be bothered to name the evil entity that starts knocking off cookie-cutter victims. The one slightly memorable thing about SPECTERS occurs when Avallone shamelessly rips off a scene from a Freddy Kruger film.

The flattery of imitation served Avallone better in MAYA, his second and last horror movie. This too is also a "demon on the loose" flick, but this time he's doling out gore-scenes worthy of Fulci, whom I suspect he studied before doing this film.

This time Avallone leads off with a Carlos Castaneda quote, a Mexican setting, and a demon whose name, Xibalba, is taken from the cognomen of the Mayan land of death. William Berger-- who's the Big Name this time, at least in the Euro-market-- dies early in MAYA, when his meddling unleashes Xibalba-- not a pure demon, but a once-mortal Mayan ruler who crossed over to the land of death to escape an enemy tribe. Now that he's loose, Xibalba wants to kill pretty much all the descendants of his enemies.

This dollop of mythology has no purpose save to give context to the multiple gore-killings, but that's a good in itself, given how little context appeared in both SPECTERS and DEMONIA. Further, MAYA offers two relatively memorable POV characters: Lisa, who comes to Mexico to learn how her father (Berger) was slain, and Peter, who helps Lisa because he hopes to get into her pants. Avallone also works in three other hot girls, all of whom get horribly killed by Xibalba, and even the non-gore scenes are much more vivid than anything in SPECTERS. MAYA suggests that Avallone might have been able to do at least more passable horror-thrillers-- but the movie flopped, and Avallone turned to other genres thereafter.

            
 

   

DEMONIA (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Wow. I suppose Lucio Fulci may have done worse films than this one, but it's the worst Fulci movie I remember seeing.

We see a prologue set in the 15th-century, depicting a mob slaying five nuns accused of witchcraft. Then we shuttle back to 20th century Toronto, where our viewpoint character Liza (Meg Register) participates in a seance with some friends. She suffers a vision of the nuns and collapses. Evans (Brett Halsey), Liza's professor from archaeology class, upbraids her for monkeying around with such outdated notions of the supernatural, particularly since they're scheduled to travel with an expedition to Greece for a dig. When Evans asks Liza why she fools around with such things, she has no explanation whatever.

Liza's a pretty good ringer for Fulci himself. Despite being the director and co-writer of this movie, he's not invested in any of the story's narrative action, except (maybe) for setting up a few of the gore-scenarios that his eighties fans came to expect of him. Once Liza and Evans are in Greece, along with a team of archaeological redshirts, the most immediate threat seems to be that of the Greek islanders. All of them make clear that they don't approve of grave-robbing scientists, though the locals don't seem aware of any legends about demon-worshipping nuns from the 15th century. One local corners Liza when she's alone in one of the forbidden sepulchers and mentions that he's a "butcher"-- by which he means the legal kind, though he's menacing enough to suggest the serial-killer variety.

DEMONIA jerks from one stupid horror-scene to another, and I suppose the main reason Evans doesn't close up shop is his skepticism about the supernatural, meaning that he blames the deaths of his colleagues on the locals. Liza has no such excuse, given how often she begins experiencing more visions of evil nuns. The fact that she doesn't even consider hopping the first flight back to Toronto underlines the vapidity of her non-character. Since neither Evans nor Liza can think worth a damn, Fulci sticks in some nothing characters to interact with them and suggest dire fates ahead-- a police inspector for Evans (one played by Fulci himself) and a medium for Liza (played by Carla Cassoli, who contributes the only half-decent performance).

The Satanic nuns are real of course, but they have no more depth than their victims. Sometimes they kill the redshirts directly, and sometimes they lure the victims into booby-traps, but their lack of motive made me miss the complex subtleties of SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS. Near-total waste of time.                   

BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Though BRIDE OF THE MONSTER is surely the second best-known Ed Wood movie to general audiences, it can't hold a candle to the lunacy of the champion, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, or other runners-up for the Weird-Wood Awards. like GLEN OR GLENDA and even NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. A possible reason for this lack of terminal bizarreness is that Wood collaborated on the script with Alex Gordon, who may have kept the narrative a little more linear than most solo Wood scripts. In many ways, BRIDE feels like an update of a 1942 programmer like THE MAD MONSTER, which also involved a mad scientist seeking to create superhumans to win armed conflicts between nations.

That doesn't mean that the Gordon-Wood script doesn't have some glaring goof-ups. Mad scientist Doctor Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) has set up his monster-making shop in an old house near a swamp, and he apparently mutates an octopus that hangs out in the swamp and helps Vornoff clean up the leftovers of his failed experiments. Two hunters, fleeing a violent storm, try to take shelter in Vornoff's house, only to have the scientist turn them away, with the aid of Vornoff's huge bald henchman Lobo (wrestler Tor Johnson). The hunters flee, but one is seized and killed by the octopus. Lobo apprehends the other hunter and drags him back to Vornoff's laboratory, where Vornoff tries to transform the guy into an "atomic superman," but only succeeds in killing his subject-- whom he also feeds to the octopus.

This provides the first absurdity of the script: if Vornoff's perpetually on the lookout for people on whom to experiment, why wouldn't he invite the hunters into his house, and then let Lobo subdue the men, so that Vornoff would have two subjects for experimentation? I don't plan to go looking for the original Gordon script, so I'm okay with not knowing if Gordon or Wood jumped the gun by introducing the octopus before he was needed. True, the first failed experiment is all the viewer needs to see to get Vornoff's modus operandi, so the underwhelming "death by octopus" (in which footage of a real octopus is loosely juxtaposed with the hunter's underwater struggles) was clearly just a means of first providing the exposition and then getting rid of both interlocutors. 

Soon the audience learns, from police captain Robbins, that there have been ten previous victims, but it's only now that the captain decides to assign a cop to the case, young Dick Craig (Tony McCoy, whose father helped Wood finance the film). In addition, Dick's fiancee, reporter Janet (Loretta King), plans to launch her own investigation, starting with the house of Vornoff. Robbins also tells Craig to talk to a visiting scientist, Strowski, who has some observations about Famous Monsters He Has Known. But after the scientist dispenses some double-talk about Loch Ness for some reason, Strowski like Janet heads out to the Vornoff house on his own.

Janet's car goes off the road and Lobo finds her, taking her back to the lab while falling in love with her basic cuteness. Vornoff decides Janet will be his next experiment and he hypnotizes her into compliance. Strowski shows up and reveals to the audience that he's an agent from the country of Vornoff's origin. Vornoff was exiled because his government thought he was crazy, but evidently Strowski pursued Vornoff's course as he went around to various places (including Loch Ness) breeding some sort of monsters. Strowski is willing to take Vornoff back home by force-- probably a signal that it's a Communist-bloc country-- but Lobo intervenes and Strowski ends up as octo-pie.

Robbins, Craig and comical Kelton the Cop converge on the house, but for some reason I forget, only Craig breaks into Vornoff's lab just as the scientist's seeking to transform Janet into an atomic superwoman. This imo might have been more entertaining than what does transpire. Lobo kayos Craig, but decides that he doesn't want Janet to become "the bride of the atom." He frees her, Vornoff shoots the hulking henchman, and despite his wound Lobo subjects the mad scientist to his own process. Vornoff (played by a stunt man) arises, for some reason becoming a superman despite the earlier failures. Super-Vornoff flees the lab, while Lobo perishes in a fire (supposedly). Craig and Janet escape, and when the other cops arrive but can't harm Vornoff with gunfire, Craig rolls a boulder down on the scientist, casting him into the swamp. The octopus attacks Vornoff and I think they both blow up either from an atomic explosion or from a lightning-strike, depending on who you ask.

BRIDE is one of those films that's pretty much used-up the first time you see it. Like PLAN 9, BRIIDE has loads of directing mistakes, plot inconsistencies, and daffy, poorly defined characters. But once I'd seen them-- they had nothing more to offer. That's why I say Gordon may have kept the project a little too conventional, though there's no way to be sure.

And of course, one can like BRIDE sentimentally, as the last feature-film to give Bela Lugosi a substantial role before his passing. It's not a great Lugosi performance because of the limitations of the role, but he gives it his all, something that can't be said of the other, mostly undertalented performers. The script might have had some fun with the "atom-mania" prevailing in the fifties, but all one gets on that score is a brief though weird correlation between atomic fallout and juvenile delinquency. BRIDE is required viewing for anyone interested in Ed Wood. But I haven't found that it rewards repeat viewings.    

ADDENDUM: I'll modify my opening statement about the script's use of the octopus somewhat. It's true that there's no good reason, internally, for Vornoff to send away the two hunters, when he could use both of them as experiment fodder. But in terms of the overall scheme of the narrative, it is important for the audience to know that the octopus isn't confined to Vornoff's basement, and that the creature has access to the swamp outside-- because it has to be in the swamp at the climax, where both Vornoff and the octopus are mutually destroyed by something or other. So the scene in which one of the hunters is crossing a bridge in the swamp when he's killed by the menacing mollusc does serve to set up the film's conclusion.   

           

                                 

SHE BEAST (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

"Hey, we can only afford Barbara Steele for a few days' shooting on this picture!"

"Not to worry: we'll shoot her few scenes so that they bookend the main story, and audiences will be satisfied as long as they see her at the beginning and the end."

That's of course a made-up idea of what might have prompted Michael Reeves to invest his own money into this mediocrity in order to launch his directing career. Other considerations could have been simply finding out that the bankable actress was only available to Reeves for a limited amount of time, or any number of other contingencies. Nevertheless, SHE BEAST is not a Barbara Steele film just because Steele is in the movie for maybe 20 minutes, and I as a viewer resent that what Reeves and company gave viewers was the menace of an ugly old witch in place of Steel's imperial beauty. "Subverting expectations" was as much of a cop-out then as it is now.         

A prologue shows us a town of aggrieved Transylvanians lynching an ugly witch, one Vardella, back in the 1700s, by drowning her in a local lake.  a honeymooning couple named Veronica and Philip (Steele, Ian Ogilvy) trek through Transylvania and get lost. They check into the only hotel available, run by slovenly owner Ladislav (Mel Welles). The couple meets a local eccentric, Count Von Helsing, who claims to be descended from the same (non-aristocratic) doctor from the DRACULA story, which he intimates was real life. At night Ladislav peeps through a window at Veronica, and Philip responds by beating the tar out of the innkeeper.

Morning comes and the couple get in their car and drive away. They don't get far, for when they near the lake where Vardella died, an occult force seizes the car, causing it to plunge into the lake. A truck driver pulls two bodies out of the waters, a still-living Philip and what looks like the corpse of a raddled old woman. What happened to Veronica? Philip doesn't have a clue, but Von Helsing knows that if he and Philip don't complete an exorcism ritual, Vardella will come back to life in Veronica's usurped body. And then most of the movie is devoted to Philip and Von Helsing trying to overcome Vardella's curse, and the ambivalent results of their endeavors.

This is largely a paint-by-the-numbers horror flick, which was probably sufficient for a lot of viewers back in the day, though it's pretty scant of strong horror moments. Only two elements stand out from the routine. One is Mel Welles, who played his lascivious, Commie-maxim-spouting innkeeper for all he's worth, and almost certainly contributed his own lines to the script. The other-- as if to make up for the absence of the regal Steele beauty-- is a scene in which Ladislav's niece (Lucretia Love) tries to take shelter with her uncle to avoid the weirdness, and the slob tries to rape her. He doesn't succeed but the incident does serve to inject into the film some nubile flesh, thus slightly offsetting the repellent image of Vardella, who's equally ghastly both dead and alive.

                   

DEADLY SWEET (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

First off, I've long heard the name of erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass, but have only seen a G-rated 1964 film he directed, THE FLYING SAUCER, which is probably not representative of his work. DEADLY SWEET, which also used the title I AM WHAT I AM, may not be any more so.  

Second, SWEET is a hard film to classify. The poster above calls SWEET "a sexy giallo thriller," but aside from the director/co-writer's use of garish color, there's not much here to tie the movie in with the giallos as they later developed. SWEET might be deemed to prefigure the way some later giallos combined psycho-horror with crime thrillers, and indeed this film frequently seems like a sendup of a crime thriller. The only metaphenomenal element is that of a perilous psycho, but Brass approaches the genre-element of "find the killer" with a studied indifference, underscored by two separate references either to director Michelangelo Antonioni or to that director's BLOW-UP from the previous year. Since that movie also concerned a crime that almost gets lost in the protagonist's experiences in the world of Swinging Sixties London, there can't be much doubt that Brass wanted attentive viewers to pick up on his emulations-- for all that BLOW-UP became an international sensation while SWEET was essentially forgotten.

POV character Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an out-of-work actor in London, and he's not painted as the brightest bulb, given that he's given to dropping random quotes of persons as different as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse-tung. While in a disco-- where he's been cut off for failure to pay his bar tab-- he spies four well-known upper-class celebrities: blonde heiress Jane Burroughs (Ewa Aulin), her brother Jerome, her stepmother Martha, and an older man, Leris, rumored to be keeping company with Martha since her husband passed away. This sounds a lot like the sort of nuclear family constellation that makes for dramatic explosions, but unlike most giallos, family conflicts get lost in the shuffle.

Bernard drops in on the club's owner and finds the man dead, while in the same room is Jane, who immediately claims, "I didn't do it." Does Bernard do the sane thing and call the cops? No, he decides he's going to play detective (he even wears a trenchcoat during most of the film) and try to exonerate the waifish Jane. When she introduces herself, he responds to the name "Jane Burroughs" with "Me Tarzan," making clear that Bernard nurtures delusions of being a rescuing hero. And Jane seems content to let him squire her around the sights of Swinging London-- at least, until she's seized by kidnappers (one played by a very young David Prowse). Then Bernard has to start playing detective for real, eventually linking up with Brother Jerome to save Jane.

Though in many giallos the kidnappers would be related to the murder, here they seem to be nothing but mundane extortionists. Along the way Leris, the supposed lover of Martha, is also murdered, and toward the movie's conclusion-- amid lots of psychedelia, jump cuts, pop art imagery, and brief shifts from color to black-and-white-- Bernard finally gets around to interviewing Stepmother Martha. She promptly reveals that she wasn't the one Leris was dating on the sly, and Bernard learns that a hero should never trust a blonde waif, even after she lets said hero jump her bones.

Euro-comics master Guido Crepax is credited with having story-boarded SWEET, and most of the time the movie looks like an attempt to apply the sixties' pop art aesthetic to a whole motion picture. Pop art appears in many location backgrounds, including one Batman painting not known to me and one of Lichtenstein's famous "blow-ups" of a single romance-comics panel. In two different scenes violence is punctuated with quick "sound-effects" like "SLAM," a clear shout-out to '66 BATMAN, and Bernard also has a close encounter with Alfred E. Neumann. Even Jane's enigmatic line-- "I am what I am"-- might be derived from a certain salty sailor. I don't think Brass had any particular point to make with these citations, though, any more than his conjurations with the sixties music scene. Swinging London does at times seem to dissolve into a Dionysian chaos far from anything that Humphrey Bogart, or even Jean-Paul Belmondo, ever had to cope with. Thus I classify SWEET as an irony, in that the film depicts a world where even the story's Big Reveal doesn't make things any less chaotic.

                        

 

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I don't think most Edgar Allan Poe stories lend themselves to feature-film adaptation. Thus, I'd usually rather see an adaptor "juice up" an adaptation of a problematic work like Poe's USHER in order to make the film work according to the necessities of cinematic storytelling, rather than plod his way through a script with absolute fidelity to the prose source.

Of course, there are good deviations and bad deviations. Alan Birkenshaw's 1989 HOUSE doesn't even make a token effort toward keeping faith, and so it's just rubbish, consisting of all sorts of junk, including the kitchen sink. However, when Richard Matheson adapted USHER for Corman in the 1960 film, he apparently realized that the audience would need some reason for the house to be so malefic. And so Matheson imported, possibly from Hawthorne, the idea that the house was pervaded with the degeneracy of the Usher ancestors-- which works dramatically, even if it doesn't have much to do with Poe.

TV-scribe Stephen Lord does something similar to Matheson in working out a new scenario for this TV-film. After the principals have lurked about for the first hour of the movie, Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) reveals to the viewpoint character Jonathan (Robert Hays) that the reason the house constantly shifts and shakes is because Roderick's ancestors performed rites of devil-worship there. I don't think this was a particularly good idea. However, as long as we don't see cartoon devils running around, Usher's superstititon can be relegated to his own demented fantasies.

Somewhat better is Lord's alteration of the viewpoint character. Whereas Roderick's visitor in the story is just an old school chum, Jonathan is an architect who knew Roderick in school, and Roderick summons him to attempt shoring up the unstable edifice. Jonathan, having no idea what he's getting into, brings along his new bride Jennifer (Charlene Tilton).

Though it takes a while for Jonathan to learn the history of the house, Lord immediately lets the POV character in on Lord's big change about the last two surviving Ushers. In the prose story, Roderick is afflicted with an illness that makes him hypersensitive to loud sounds and other sensory impacts, while his sister Madeleine suffers from catalepsy-- which situation leads Roderick to entomb his sibling, maybe not quite innocently. In the movie, both Roderick and Madeleine suffer from the same disease, and Madeleine (Dimitra Arliss), rather than going mad after getting buried alive, is the epitome of that trope known as "the madwoman in the attic." Indeed, the first time Jonathan meets the crazy lady, she tries to kill him with an axe.

If in the story the crumbling house is the objective correlate to Roderick's disintegrating mind, here monstrous Madeleine lines up with the self-destructive house. Roderick and his servant Thaddeus (Ray Walston) confine her in a room, but she gets loose again, menacing poor confused Jennifer. Oddly, the house itself "kills" the madwoman with one of its tremors, dropping some masonry on Madeleine. This gives Roderick the justification to nail his sister into a coffin. But she gets better and breaks free, pushing the nails out of their holes with her bare fingers. She kills the servant and menaces both of the innocent bystanders, and frankly, Arliss makes one of the better cinematic Madeleines, her eyes weeping tears of blood. She seems okay with just killing everyone in her path. Roderick belatedly decides he's doomed to die by her hands (and by the evil will of the House, I guess), though that begs the question as to why he imagined he could triumph over the cursed house by working on its supports. Anyway, at least the filmmakers got that part of the Poe story more or less right, since Roderick dies fighting with Madeleine, allowing the two innocents to escape. I gather the budget didn't allow for a model-house sinking into a tarn, so lightning hits the house and the vile dwelling goes up in flames. 

Apparently the production was somehow linked to the Classics Illustrated comics-line, since there's a quick shot of CI's cover of their USHER adaptation before credits roll. I don't know how good the comic was, but I've seen far worse USHER films than this one.

   

                          

MONSTER ISLAND (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I almost want to create a neologism for movies that look a lot like the once-celebrated Pixar brand of animated features-- "Pixar-rips," maybe. The Mexican-financed CGI flick MONSTER ISLAND has at least the general look of a Pixar film, as well as a comfortable sort of "be yourself" moral. Not surprisingly, ISLAND lacks the wit and distinctive design-sense in the better Pixars. Still, I've seen much worse in the realm of original kid-vid movies.

For once, the title's accurate in that most of the story takes place on the island. For the first half hour, middle-schooler Lucas lives with his widower-father Nicholas, coping with school bullies and flirty girls. Nicholas constantly badgers Lucas to regularly dose himself with a special inhaler, to stave off some "attacks" to which their family is vulnerable. However, when Lucas attends a party of his schoolmates without using his inhaler first, he's somewhat torqued to learn that without that chemical, he turns into a huge, winged orange monster. He manages to reach his dad, and Nicholas reveals that though he sacrificed his ability to change into a monster somehow, the rest of their family-- including Lucas' late mother-- dwell on a special island called Calvera. 

I suspect that director/co-writer Leopoldo Aguilar was not too concerned about his universe, for it's never clear to what extent the human world knows about Calvera, or if there's any connection to the multifarious types of creatures there with regular humans. Lucas manages to reach Calvera to learn more about the family he never knew, which includes his big orange grandmother and an uncle named Norcutt, who seems to be a "recessive" type of creature since he looks like an ordinary human. Every entity on Calvera, no matter his or her bizarre shape, wears clothes and lives in a peaceful city, and thus aren't really "monsters" except in the sense of not looking like human beings. Their only problem is that some mysterious malefactor has been kidnapping Calvera's citizens. Hmm-- who could it be? Could it be the one resident who feels as isolated from his people as Lucas did from his middle-school peers? 

          

 If ISLAND offered nothing beyond Lucas's struggle with his monstrous identity, or Nicholas' desire to protect him, the film would have earned only poor mythicity from me. However, I rather liked Norcutt, who's motivated by "monster envy" to the extent that he's been draining off something-or-other from captive Calverans. His purpose is to transform himself to a powerful, malicious entity-- in other words, what most people think of when they hear the word "monster." Monster-Norcutt is the movie's only reasonably well-designed critter, and though ISLAND is supposed to be a comedy, its best scene is a big battle in which Lucas and Nicholas, both of whom are in monster-form, contend with Norcutt and his two bulky henchmen. Otherwise, there's not much here, though as I said ISLAND at least looks better than a lot of cartoon kid-vid and would probably be reasonably satisfying to munchkins.  ISLAND apparently made enough dough that three years later that Aguilar made another cartoon feature, which despite the name of MONSTER ZONE, seems to have nothing to do with ISLAND.

NIGHT FRIGHT (1967), TOP LINE (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Despite having lots of trash-films to choose from on streaming channels, I can't help checking out the various junk offered on the Mill Creek collections. I haven't found anything outstanding yet, even in a "so bad it's good" way. Yet at least sometimes even crap gives me exercise in finding a new way to condemn it.

I'd seen the cheapie "teens vs space monster" flick NIGHT FRIGHT broadcast on TV long ago and remembered nothing about it but a general negative impression. And there really was almost nothing to remember. It's at least a small curiosity that this dull 1967 drive-in fodder got re-released on some 1980s video label with a new title, implying that FRIGHT might be a more violent version of Spielberg's E.T. 

Most of the film involves a gorilla-like monster who emerged from a "spaceship" stomping around a rural town and killing off a few generally "clean" teens, before the sheriff (John Agar, the only "name" actor) brings the creature down. No one else can act their way out of a paper bag, and the monster is only shot in darkness, probably to conceal the suit's zipper. One small novelty in the script is that the monster isn't an alien. According to an explanation by the town's high-school professor-- who was apparently involved with the US space program at some time-- the creature is an Earth-animal, possibly a real gorilla, whom American scientists experimented on so that it could survive in outer space. So the "spaceship" was American-made, but it was launched with, what, zero publicity?  Frankly, the 1959 origin of DC's monster-ape Titano-- also an Earth-anthropoid sent into space, where he got special powers-- makes this bland piece of tedium look pretty sad.

     

TOP LINE, an actual eighties movie, is at least lively if no more consistent than NIGHT FRIGHT. 

Italian writer-director Nello Rossati had worked on at least two decent junk-movies known to me: the Ursula Andress sex-flick THE SENSUOUS NURSE and DJANGO STRIKES AGAIN, the only legitimate sequel to the 1960s DJANGO. I suspect that Franco Nero's association with TOP LINE was born of having worked with Rossati on the DJANGO sequel. The poster makes TOP look like another Indiana Jones clone, but what viewers got was an erratic, confusing "thriller" about an author and his girlfriend who discover that there are aliens among us.

What's the nature of the aliens, and what are they doing on Earth? Why do various government agencies pursue Author Ted and gal-pal June (Nero and Debrah Moore) to keep them from revealing the aliens' dubious secrets to the public? Why did guys like William Berger and George Kennedy consent to do glorified cameos here? Maybe this nonsense would have been more bearable if Nero and Moore had played a tough guy and girl like the leads of RAIDERS. Then, TOP might have been a decent "Indiana Clone." But all the stars do here is run away a lot. There are just two diverting scenes. In one, the protagonists are pursued by a Terminator-like robot, but they manage to thwart the automaton by luring him into the horns of a dilemma-- a dilemma consisting of a savage bull. In the other, Ted finds out the hard way that his ex-wife is one of the aliens, and that she's actually a lizard-like humanoid in Earth-disguise. Rossati doesn't write any memorable dialogue here, but Nero sells the scene with his look of horror, implicitly at having slept with a lizard-lady without catching on to any difference. The bottom line is that TOP LINE is pretty close to the bottom, but Moore and Nero keep this crap from being as stinky as many other timewasters.

            

BRAIN ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Why would anyone make a schlock-movie tribute to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE that lasts THREE AND A HALF HOURS, and why would anyone watch it? I can't answer the first question, but I have a partial answer to the second. In my case, I was looking for something mindless to play in the background while I worked on a fairly involved couple of blogposts. So I checked out the first few minutes of BRAIN ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE, whose title is a callout to PLAN's unused original title, "Grave Robbers from Outer Space. As soon as I heard director/co-writer Garland Hewitt trying to finesse his story of invading, zombie-making aliens with faux-learned references about HP Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley and the Illuminati, I knew I'd found my ideal timewaster.

I can also guess at the reason why Hewitt undertook the project: in the hope of garnering publicity for his career (which from looking at his credits on IMDB does not seem to have gone anywhere much). If one appreciates the degree of work it takes to put together just an average hour-and-half DTV flick, one has to give Hewitt some credit for persistence. The most detailed online review of this turkey asserts that Hewitt spent TEN YEARS compiling almost four hours of shot-on-video scenes with amateur actors, while IMDB estimates that his budget might have been about a thousand bucks. IMDB also carries a publicity line about how all of the assorted "actors" had "one degree of" links to Ed Wood. More like "one degree of links to COPS." That's what ROBBERS looks like; endless scenes of people sitting around tacky houses or trailers having meaningless conversations, occasionally interrupted by aliens, who also have a lot of meaningless conversations. The very tenuous connections to PLAN are that (a) head alien Morphea, who seems to be a fellow in drag, claims to be the granddaughter of the original two aliens, and that she's again reviving corpses in order to conquer Earth, and (b) one of the humans opposing Morphea is supposed to be an older version of "Officer Jamey," a support-character from PLAN. He's played by the only professional actor in the troupe, Conrad Brooks, who turned his reputation for having been in six Ed Wood movies into a long-term career of "so-bad-they-might-be-good" DTV movies. To say that he's the best actor in this movie, though, is no compliment. Brooks had about as much competition from the other players as he did from pieces of inanimate furniture.

Here the highlights that I bothered to scribble down:

At one point, some fishermen find a canister on a downed flying saucer. They take the canister for examination to a scientist, who analyzed it with what sounded like a "morphic resonance" machine. Hey, it's one thing to pick on the long-dead Aleister Crowley, but Rupert Sheldrake is still alive!

Since Hewitt must've felt the film needed someone to be his sequel's "Vampira," Morphea takes it into her head to change an ordinary Earth-girl named Lilith (Lara Stewart) into a bloodsucker. This she does with some mumbo-jumbo about a serpentine spirit related (I think) to the Lilith of Jewish legend. Later this action bites Morphea (is her name another Sheldrake reference?) in the ass because Lilith turns on the head alien, beats her down and kills her near the climax.

Aged Officer Jamey (who has in his house a framed photo of a younger Brooks with Bela Lugosi) is joined by various forgettable allies, one being a young policewoman, Mary (Raye Ramsey), whose big scene consists of bitch-slapping some guy-- which was more action that we get from all the desultory zombie-killing moments.

A gypsy fortuneteller utters lines from both THE WOLF MAN and GLEN AND GLENDA.

And finally, Hewitt tries to come up with a few Wood-like malapropisms, the chief one being, "prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but grave robbing probably runs a close second."

But in truth, Hewitt's homage has nearly nothing in common with the oeuvre of Ed Wood. Wood had a fetish about female clothing and was only able to grind out his dimestore movies thanks to a cast of eccentrics. But in truth his most famous works are very "Hollywood" in the TYPE of stories he told, as opposed to his ability to tell them. To be sure, I've seen none of Wood's porno work, but it looks to me like he did those films to pay his bills, and that he'd much rather have been directing B-westerns. If Hewitt's messterpiece resembles any low-budget auteur's movies, ROBBERS resembles a much longer version of a Ray Dennis Steckler flick. But even this comparison fails to some extent, for the partisans of Steckler (not me) sometimes argue that all the people in his films look like they're having a good time with their schlock. Maybe that was true of the multitudinous members of the ROBBERS cast, or at least of a few, like the two dudes aping the Tarantino hitmen from PULP FICTION. But if so, the performers don't transmit any of their glee to the lens of the camera.